Introduction

Psychical reality is a particular form of existence not to be confused with material reality.

A felt need to convert the conscious rational experience into dream.

Love in infant or mother or both increases rather than decreases the obstruction.

Continuity and change, stasis and transformation, these are the themes which connect the various lines of enquiry I have pursued since the early 1970s. They are central to both clinical psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic theory.

Before becoming a psychoanalyst I was interested in looking at how change takes place through life events and in issues of positive mental health; that is, with that which is more than the absence of ill-health. I was not well acquainted with Winnicott's writing at the time but this would have been about the time when he wrote “that absence of psychoneurotic illness may be health, but it is not life” (1971, p. 100). This interest, coupled with an interest in identity, identifications and change, and in femininity as an aspect of it, led me to a research project on first pregnancies (Breen, 1975). There, I described two models I found in the literature: one which discusses pregnancy as a hurdle from which one recovers and returns to a pre-pregnancy state as one does an illness; and one which discusses it from the perspective of development. I looked at first pregnancies

as a time of necessary change, a time when a woman needs to make psychic changes if she is to become a mother without a breakdown of one kind or another. Particular moments in life require change if they are to be lived, not just gone through. Stasis signals problems. Pregnancy and early motherhood are such a time when internal object relationships and identifications need to be reworked and modified (Breen, 1975, 1981, 1986).

This interest in stasis and change has continued to focus my thinking. Temporality infuses psychoanalysis. It may be found at the metapsychological level, in